Climate change policy needs a shot in the arm, not a rethink

With the latest figures suggesting we’d need the equivalent of bringing a new nuclear power plant online every day for the next 30 years to hit the IPCC’s carbon-free energy targets, it’s time we looked at subsidies and investment, writes James Moore

The radical policies and societal changes we need to get started are barely on the table (PA)

Time to bin climate change targets and think again?

The University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke, who teaches on policy and governance issues related to science, recently argued in Forbes that the world is doomed to miss the 2030 target of reducing CO2 emissions by 45 per cent from 2010 en route to reaching “net zero” around 2050.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says this is what is needed if we are to limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5C.

But Pielke serves up some uncomfortable-looking maths concerning energy use in opposition to that.

He makes the case that the IPCC’s target implies an allowance of about 5,950 million tons of oil equivalent (mtoe) of fossil fuel consumption for 2030, a reduction of about 5,800 mtoe from 2018.

But assuming that energy consumption grows by 2.2 per cent per year, which isn’t unreasonable, the world will consume about 4,200 mtoe more in 2030 than in 2018.

Based on that, we will need about 10,000 mtoe of carbon-free energy by 2030. In practical terms? This amounts to the equivalent of bringing a new nuclear plant online every day for the next 30 years while retiring a corresponding amount of fossil fuel energy production.

The nuclear analogy is a smart one, especially if you’re looking at it from this country, where getting just one (Hinkley Point C) off the ground has involved years of debate, delay and doubts over financing. It increasingly looks like another rotten egg laid by the government of David Cameron.

Pielke uses these numbers, and others, to call for a climate policy rethink. A dose of realism if you like.

I would respectfully disagree. Here’s the thing with that target: we’re not going to get there if we don’t even try and right now we are not trying.

The garden of England could look more like southern Spain by the end of the century if action isn’t taken, with far-reaching implications for farming and food production

The radical policies, and the societal changes, that we need to get started are barely on the table. The government of Pielke’s own country, the world’s second-biggest carbon emitter, denies that they’re even necessary, although some of its states have notably different views.

Pielke’s numbers serve to demonstrate this. Over the past decade, he says, the world added about 64 mtoe of carbon-free energy every year. In 2018 it added a record 114 mtoe.

He makes the very good point that right now this is not so much replacing carbon-emitting fuel, consumption of which increased by 275 mtoe. It’s merely serving as an additive to it.

But there’s another possible response to maths like that. Instead throwing up our hands, we could roll up our collective sleeves and say: “Let’s get started.”

We need to do that because there’s some very, very uncomfortable science around concerning the effects of not acting. It will keep you up at night. It contains more horrors than a double bill of Stephen King’s The Shining and Doctor Sleep.

Just this week a paper published in Environmental Research Letters suggested “the garden of England” could look more like southern Spain by the end of the century if action isn’t taken, with far-reaching implications for farming and food production.

The lead researcher, Professor Tim Lenton from the University of Exeter, told The Independent: “The east and southeast will be a parched grassland in the summer and, if there is livestock on it, it will be low stocking level.”

10,000

mtoe of carbon-free energy is needed by 2030 to meet targets

That’s bad enough. But on a scare-o-meter Lenton’s doesn’t register as highly as some of those looking at the impact on various parts of the world of rising sea levels and ocean acidification, and the detrimental effects on human and environmental health we are experiencing right now thanks to the carbon economy, let alone in the future.

If we don’t enact radical policies benchmarked on achieving that target we’re going to end up in a radical mess.

Here’s a start we could make that isn’t really all that radical. What if we scrapped fossil fuel subsidies and diverted the resources to non-carbon-emitting energy sources?

Advocacy group Oil Change International puts the annual subsidy to the oil, coal and gas industries at between $775bn ($599bn) and $1 trillion, “not including other costs of fossil fuels related to climate change, environmental impacts, military conflicts and spending, and health impacts”.

The latter point is well made because they are considerable. Just look at the number of children carrying asthma inhalers in school playgrounds.

You might not create the equivalent of a new nuclear plant every day were that money to be diverted to alternatives. We don’t know because it hasn’t been tried. But an inalienable rule of the free market Forbes readers love is that capital follows capital when it’s made available. I’d be willing to bet my house that the numbers would look rather better if this step were taken as part of a serious effort to tackle climate change.

The UK has already shown what can be done with offshore wind, for example. Now, just think of the innovation all that money could spark.

I don’t intend this piece as an attack on Pielke, who makes an intelligent and well-reasoned case. We could surely use more of that given how poisonous debates have become.

It’s with his conclusions that I take issue.

To my mind, climate policy doesn’t need a rethink so much as it needs a shot in the arm. If doesn’t get one, we’ll face some really uncomfortable maths through totting up the costs of doing nothing.